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Composer and multi-instrumentalist Alexander Berne's "Self Referentials" is a profoundly enigmatic listening experience. It doesn't make the kind of sense that we may have come to expect from a piece of music. It isn't an argument or a story; it doesn't come to a point. It isn't about themes or climaxes. At the same time, it's too seductive to the ear to pass as furniture-music, and it's too rich to serve as some austere meditation. What it is, is a trip: it's a journey, taken through a pair of headphones, into an unfamiliar land.

Berne comes right out and calls the three-movement suite that ends the first disc, Headphonic Apparitions—in case the listener needed that nudge to submerge him or herself fully in this immersive soundworld—but the whole record is rich with experiments in stereophonic ambience. The spatial "where" and the atmospheric "how" of the music are as important as, if not more than, the conventional "what."

This journey is a long and wandering one, but the music seems organized by an impenetrable logic, as recurring musical elements come back around like a vast, inexorable system rotating through one more epicycle. Elements of rock, jazz, chillout electronica and South Asian music drift through the mix, not with a sense that anything goes but with a sense that everything that rises must converge, that there's some elemental commonality between these overlapping piano melodies, those plaintive reeds, that dance beat.

But if the style is diffuse, the genre indefinable and the form utterly devoid of rhetorical or narrative thrust, "Self Referentials" is nevertheless an unmistakably subjective project. The listener is, ultimately, being led by the composer, through a carefully curated collection of nicely wrought sonic events. And for all the technical polish of the ambient acoustics, they still have the idiosyncratic, homemade feel of one of Brian Eno's early "Ambient" experiments. Each musical gesture's handwrought timbres of each musical gesture and the long, slow rhythms of their recurrence are as deeply personal a musical statement as any—it just happens to have been constructed and developed according to its own peculiarly beguiling new aesthetic.

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Daniel Stephen Johnson was born in the desert and learned to play the violin. After studying viola and English at the University of Southern California, he wrote fiction at Columbia University. Then he moved to Connecticut, where he worked at a record shop and wrote about music, literature and comedy for the New Haven Advocate and the Believer. Now he lives in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and works as a sheet music salesman in Queens.

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About Q2 Music Album of the Week

Q2 Music's Album of the Week is our weekly review of the newest and most dynamic contemporary classical releases. It focuses on musical discovery, world premiere recordings and fresh perspectives on today's classical landscape. Read our review and stream the album on-demand for one week only at www.wqxr.org/q2music/.